5 Reasons Why You Should Spend at Least 20% of Your Time on Recruiting

If you’re a sales leader, the fastest way to success is to recruit the right team members. Without the talent you need to succeed, you’ll find yourself with a whole new set of problems.

Recruiting is hard work, and requires a top slot on your priority list. Now is the time to start looking for the talent you need to achieve your goals.

Yet there is no single activity that will impact a company’s sales success more than hiring the right salespeople.

— The Science of Selling, David Hoffeld

5 REASONS WHY SALES recruiting SHOULD BE YOUR number one priority THIS YEAR

#1: Great salespeople make everyone look good. When your sales team is exceeding quota because you’ve filled it with motivated and passionate professionals, your job as a sales manager becomes 10x easier.

Without the right talent, you’ll find yourself spending all your time on performance discussions, one-on-ones, and meetings about why your reps are not hitting their goals.

You can prevent the externalities that come with bad sales hires by tenacious recruiting. You’ll have to take an active role in recruiting and do what you must to get the best people on your team. It’s much easier to recruit average reps than the top 10% for a reason.

#2: Hiring the right people is transformative. You can’t transform the unmotivated or unwilling into top producers.

Unless you enjoy motivating by fear, you’ll need to hire the passionate, optimistic, charismatic, and driven. They will also need to have the skills to succeed in your sales environment.

If you approach your recruiting efforts with a short term, no-hire, no-revenue attitude, you’ll have a revolving door which will cost you money, time, and future star-hires.

When you’re recruiting, take the time to ask well thought out questions. Listen to the candidates’ answers so you can get as much information as possible before making a decision.

When you get the right people on the team, you’ll notice your job is easier.

You don’t have to spend time trying to coach people to fill the pipeline, deals come together with greater predictability, forecasting is on the mark, and it becomes easier for you to meet revenue targets.

#3: Because you’re always looking for talent, you are more apt to find moldable candidates with the right attitude and help them become exceptional. As you become skilled at developing sales talent successfully, your reputation will expand, and you’ll soon be known as the leader who gets people promoted.

You will naturally attract ambitious sales talent who see the value in working for you and being a part of your team. You’ll get better at recruiting and letting go of underperformers because you have an active pipeline of sales talent.

#4: Sales is the lifeblood of the company. Great products, exceptional service, cool branding, none of that matters if your organization doesn’t have sales. It’s very simple but easy to forget. If your team isn’t selling, it won’t be long before the company closes its doors.

Therefore, as a sales leader, it’s your job to make sure you have the right people on the team at all times who will help you protect the company’s cash flow.

Hire the best sales talent you can find, and all the problems that are created by not having the right people on the team will start to disappear.

#5: When you’re always recruiting because it’s your #1 priority, you’re more likely to hire the best. If you are always looking for star talent, you will have the opportunity to engage more of it.

You will remove the “perfect timing” roadblock, and put your company in the market for hiring superstar talent at all times.

There are no shortcuts for recruiting star sales talent, but it will save you time in the long run because you won’t be hiring people who can’t close deals, can’t motivate themselves, or continuously miss their targets.

Recruiting parallels selling in many ways.

First, develop your criteria for hiring top sales talent. Then you need to build a pipeline, fill it with strong candidates, and move them through the recruitment process.

There are metrics you can use to measure your progress and accurately predict the pipeline you need to staff your sales team.

Interview to hire ratios, second interviews, and offer to acceptance ratios, are predictive measurements you can use to track your recruitment progress.

Recruiting for your sales team takes a lot of time and energy. Getting it wrong it extraordinarily expensive.

Getting it right can mean you’re on the way to repeatable growth and success. If you need help recruiting your sales team, let’s connect today!